One fact makes the detention of a former Columbia University student especially relevant to Michael Roth: The day before his arrest by ICE agents, Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil reportedly wrote to his university’s interim president asking for help.
Roth is also a university president, leading Wesleyan University, so he understands some of the issues that may have confronted Columbia’s leader. Perhaps even more important, Roth is known as both an ardent defender of Israel and of freedom of speech.
College presidents are on difficult terrain amid President Donald Trump’s broader attack on various institutions of higher education, particularly as the administration threatens to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars from universities.
But in an interview with POLITICO Magazine, Roth said he worries that a growing number of colleges have adopted positions of institutional neutrality in a misguided effort to avoid controversy.
Roth said he has no desire to fight the Trump administration just for the sake of it, but that universities need to remain fierce advocates of students’ right to protest and universities’ independence.
“The infatuation with institutional neutrality,” he said, “is just making cowardice into a policy.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What was your first reaction to hearing of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest?
I was really shocked that someone in the United States would be arrested for having participated in a lawful demonstration. I assumed there were some other justifications, I thought there would be some crime that had been committed for which the individual was being held accountable. But as I learned more about it, I saw that this was part of this broader attempt to intimidate people from protesting in ways that the White House doesn’t like.
Khalil had sent a letter to Columbia’s interim president asking for protection after a doxxing campaign was launched against him shortly before his arrest. What responsibility do academic institutions have for their students, or recently graduated students?
It’s a very good question, and a hard one. First of all, there is a big difference between the responsibilities you have for your students and your former students, your alumni, because although we stay in touch with our alumni, our students are more directly in our care. The doxxing campaigns, although pernicious, are also ways for people to express themselves, as offensive as I find them.
If these campaigns call for violence or intimidation, then those campaigns can be illegal, and so I think an effort to find some kind of security within the university is understandable, even by a recent graduate. As I understand it, he was living in Columbia housing at the time, which makes this even more understandable. But I don’t know the details of Columbia’s response or their policies in that regard, so I don’t want to speculate on the university’s motives.
Do universities have any recourse to resist ICE if officers come knocking on students’ doors?
Representatives of the federal government have to abide by the law. If they don’t have a judicial warrant, they should not be allowed to enter into private property. Universities have protocols for working with federal law enforcement or state and local law enforcement, and those protocols should be followed.
I think institutions ought to use the legal means at our disposal to resist any extra-legal efforts from federal law enforcement.
What sort of legal means are you referring to?
Making sure that people have the appropriate warrants, either for search or arrest, and then having recourse to the courts to protect students and faculty or staff against unlawful intimidation or detention.
I know you’ve tried to seek a middle ground as a college administrator who’s publicly pro-Israel but who has also spoken directly to students protesting the war in Gaza. Is that still possible in today’s environment?
I’ve not been in agreement with people who are protesting. That’s why they’re protesting. But I respect their rights to protest. Their politics are not mine, to be sure, but that seems neither here nor there. You have to respect the rights of people with whom you disagree, and I think presidents, deans and professors, we should model that as best we can.
How have universities and colleges’ postures toward Trump changed since his first administration?
The first Trump administration, even before it began, there were many demonstrations in many colleges and universities across the country, including at Wesleyan. College campuses have been much quieter this time than they were in the first Trump administration. I think students are trying to understand what’s going on in the country, and are not sure how best to react to the flood of executive orders coming from the White House. And this is part of the White House strategy.
I think that a lot of people are reeling, especially at the level of students and faculty. And at the institutional level, a lot of people are frightened. I think this is the greatest fear in civil society, including in the higher education system, since the McCarthy era. People are really afraid to be targeted by the government, whose powers are extraordinary, and when they’re willing to arrest or detain someone without charge and threaten to deport him without charges, that’s very frightening. Sixty schools got letters about antisemitism on campus, and that’s going to cost all those schools money to investigate and maybe to defend themselves. So, I think there’s a lot of fear that the current administration thinks of retribution as a legitimate political tactic and that has not been the case at this level for a very long time.
How does that fear you’re talking about, especially among administrators, play out on the ground?
Well, I think the infatuation with institutional neutrality is making cowardice into a policy. I guess that’s a provocative way of putting it. I have friends who don’t believe that — I’m friends with presidents who genuinely think they’re encouraging free speech by hiding, but I think that the fear is manifesting people just not wanting to talk about policies that they really do oppose. I mean, I’m hardly a radical president. The students think of me as pretty conservative. I don’t think of myself that way.
Then, there’s a massive effort to change the language that schools use to talk about the things they believe in. So, famously Chris Rufo and company have managed to make Diversity, Equity and Inclusion poisonous words, whereas I think most people think that it’s better to learn from folks who don’t always agree with you. That’s why diversity is good. Most everybody thinks fairness is a good thing, which is just what equity means, and no one is against belonging. But many administrators are so afraid to use these words because the government is using cheap versions of AI to find the words and then go after the people who use them. The idea that we now have a list of words we shouldn’t use is shocking. Schools are scrubbing their websites.
I’m no defender of some of the excesses of diversity training. Some of the accounts I’ve read were pretty hair raising in terms of the counterproductive ways in which some of those trainings took place. But this effort now to just make sure you’re not using some good old American words to talk about how you’re teaching, that’s one of the greatest infringements on free speech that I can remember in my lifetime.
The counterargument to what you’re saying is that institutional neutrality can engender the sort of ideological diversity that you’ve talked about previously.
That’s an empirical claim, but there’s just no evidence for it. Of course, you don’t want heavy handed use of authority to tell people what to think, but to model a good conversation, rather than modeling fear of authority, fear of controversy, seems to me the way to encourage more heterogeneity or diversity on campus.
Have any of your own students expressed fear in the wake of Khalil’s arrest?
I haven’t heard that specifically since the arrest. I know that people whose families have uncertain immigration status, whether they’re at Wesleyan or elsewhere, are deeply fearful right now. The protesters on my campus have expressed some fear of surveillance, and in that regard, I want to make sure that our protests stay within the bounds of time and place restrictions that are part of free speech doctrine.
Looking to the future, what do you think the relationship between the Trump administration and U.S. colleges will look like over the course of the next four years? And in what ways does that depend on college administrators?
As a teacher, I have to be an optimist. I try to imagine a world in which the importance of the autonomy of higher education, with the support of the federal government, will become more apparent. I hope that this is the early Trump administration flexing its muscles, but that over time, the value of having a more educated citizenry, the value of having scientific research that cures diseases, the value of that will become more apparent, and the government will let us do our job.
It’s not like we’re speaking out to attack President Trump. We’re speaking out to defend the missions of our schools. That’s our job. My job isn’t to attack President Trump or say, “You know, [President] Biden should have done that,” or “Senator so-and-so should have done this.” I’m not interested in just mouthing off. But I am interested in protecting the mission of the school and the students who enroll in it, and I hope more presidents see that institutional neutrality, even if they say they believe in that, it doesn’t actually prevent them from defending the mission of their institution.
Higher education is a part of civil society. It includes businesses, it includes churches, it includes libraries and schools that have functioned well in America because we haven’t had to line up behind the person in the White House. You could have lots of different ways of approaching the world that deserve support from the government, but don’t have to align perfectly with the views of anyone in the government. And that’s such an old American, even conservative, tradition, and we’re in danger of eroding that right now.
